Way back in old and boring January of this year, Microsoft announced they would be working together with the Windows Phone 7 homebrew community, with the goal of creating a stable, supported way for homebrew developers and people interested in homebrew applications to enable side-loading on their WP7 devices. Well, they took their sweet time, but the ChevronWP7 team (Rafael Rivera, Chris Walsh, and Long Zheng) and Microsoft have just announced the results.

I dunno, I've installed countless applications that way and have never felt anything being held back or whatever.

Cool. It would be interested to know for certain though, like I said, just for a true comparison.

I've also just phoned a friend to confirm something I thought I recalled him telling me. His daughter attends a highschool with an "iPhone" program (iPhone, iTouch, iPad) and according to his daughter all of the better apps developed by the students are posted to an intranet where anyone in the school with an iDevice can download and install them. It's a school of 1800 students so seemingly the 100 Ad Hoc restriction doesn't apply. I've heard Apple provide a lot of additional tools for educational institutions for management and crap so maybe this is enabled through that program.

Ah yep, just had a read of that the the links to the Ovi store publishing stuff and it all looks similar to what I've read about publishing on the iTunes App Store. Free for free apps and revenue shared for paid apps. Apple probably charges more but it's Apple, it's expected.